March 2020 will forever be remembered as the month when the world was collectively upended. When the World Health Organisation officially declared that the coronavirus outbreak was a pandemic on March 11, governments around the globe swiftly introduced strict lockdown measures, ordering people to stay at home and avoid any non-essential contact and travel to prevent the spread of the disease. For many office-based businesses, agencies included, it was completely unprecedented – a phrase that people repeated endlessly as they began to process the ‘new normal’.

Grace Francis, who was chief experience officer at Droga5 London at the time, recalls the scramble to issue guidance on how to stay safe and pivot an entire workforce to remote, as people cobbled together makeshift offices in their kitchens and bedrooms. “We hadn’t been owned by Accenture for very long and suddenly having this very clear point where things that once seemed precious and significant to me, such as the work environment, utterly shifted … I remember the first time I saw an Accenture exec in his bedroom and thinking, this is so weird.”

Some agencies were better placed than others to adapt to lockdown’s logistical challenges. BETC already allowed some degree of flexible working, having moved its office from the centre of Paris to the suburbs in 2016. “The amazing thing about that is that everything was set up – servers, tools, teams, everything. What was happening out there was so much bigger than how do we work remotely, of course, but for us it was a little bit plug and play in terms of remote working,” says the agency’s vice president Anne-Laure Brunner.

While no one at the time knew just how long the Covid-induced working conditions would last for, fast-forward to 2025 and it’s clear that the pandemic was the catalyst for a lot of the questions around the future of the traditional agency model. Over the last five years, big office spaces, permanent teams, mandatory in-person working, rigid processes and hierarchies – things that had previously been the pillars of the creative industry for decades – have been brought into sharp focus.